The Value of YOUR ISTA Membership!

Individual Teacher's Contract

• In August, 2011 ISTA immediately challenged Dr. Tony Bennett's new teacher contract form and was granted a Preliminary Injunction to keep it from being used. The judge ruled that current teacher contract forms should be used because Bennett's form did not conform to Indiana code.
• In August, 2012 ISTA opposed IDOE's attempt to overturn that Preliminary Injunction and ISTA was granted a Permanent Injunction.
• ISTA then prepared to challenge IDOE's appeal of the Injunction to the Indiana Court of Appeals.
• In March, 2013 Indiana's Court of Appeals dismissed the appeal at IDOE's request.
• ISTA is drafting a sample teacher contract providing IDOE with suggestions on how the teacher contract should read.
• This effort by ISTA and its legal counsel (costing in excess or $50,000) is worth the cost of your membership because no teacher in this state will now be forced to become an at-will employee and be required to work any and all hours their employer would request.

ISTEP Integrity Statement

• ISTA's legal efforts resulted in an immediate revision of this statement last school year and a recall of the first version teachers were mandated to sign.
• ISTA is currently working with the IDOE to further modify the statement to make it less offensive to those who are required to sign it.

License Revocations

• ISTA has successfully represented several members in license revocation cases.
• Without ISTA's efforts on their behalf, they were certain to lose or have their licenses suspended. Some of these cases were brought against teachers who had no charges of any sort pending against them and who had been entirely cleared of any offense by law enforcement and Child Protective Services but were still being pursued by the IDOE for license revocation.

Child Abuse Representation

• Eric Hylton, ISTA legal counsel, has handled more than 35 child abuse allegation cases so far this year with tremendous success in getting an unsubstantiated ruling on virtually all of them.

Permanent/Semi-Permanent Property Rights

• ISTA is currently challenging in court the property rights of teachers who have previously earned semi-permanent or permanent status but who have now been RIF'd before a less senior colleague.
• This challenge could have huge ramifications for every teacher in the state who has semi-permanent or permanent status when school districts start looking at layoffs this spring.
• ISTA is also challenging to establish the right of a semi-permanent or permanent teacher to have full evidentiary rights at a dismissal hearing.

Collective Bargaining

• ISTA has several pending cases or Unfair Labor Practice claims that will try to establish the right of teachers to bargain the payment of wages for additional hours worked into their master contracts.
• A Nettle Creek Fact Finding case is pending in a trial court and a Noblesville ULP is awaiting a hearing before the IEERB Board. Both could have significant impact on our members across the state.
• ISTA is currently inquiring into the authority of the State Board of Accounts to audit local bargaining agreements and to issue citations to local school corporations.

Legislative

• ISTA staff continues to aggressively advocate for public education and education employees and lobbying against many bills that are not favorable to ISTA members or to public education in the General Assembly, including the bill that vastly expands the current voucher program that provides public dollars to private schools.
• ISTA remains the voice for public school educators at all levels of state government.

Political Action

• ISTA was an early supporter and stayed extensively involved in the successful election of State School Superintendent Glenda Ritz and will continue to support her efforts to improve public education and the Indiana Department of Education.

Voucher Challenge

• NEA/ISTA presented oral arguments before the Indiana Supreme Court in opposition to the voucher program on November 21, 2012. ISTA continues to believe that Indiana's private school voucher program is a clear violation of the state's constitution. The Indiana Supreme Court has not yet ruled in this case.

Look for more information from ISTA soon!

ALERT! Anti-Public Education Bills

ISTA Members: Two anti-public education bills in the Indiana House need your attention and your response TODAY:

www.keepthepromiseindiana.org

PARENT TRIGGER ACCELERATION HB 1358
ATTACK ON TEACHERS' RIGHTS HB 1339

HB 1358:
Tuesday; House Education Committee will hear the accelerated "Parent Trigger" bill to enable a minority of parents to take over community-based public schools and convert them to charter schools run by corporate "lead partners".--HB 1358 (Rep. Todd Huston, R-Fishers).

WHAT HB 1358 DOES:

• Indiana's existing conversion charter school law is repealed (which requires both the school board and parents to agree on a conversion).
• That law is replaced with a model that solely enables 51% of parents in a school that is labeled in the bottom two categories for three (3) consecutive years to:

• take over the school by petitioning the state board of education to assign a "lead partner" to operate the school; and

• place the school under the most draconian of sanctions that currently attach to schools in the bottom two lowest categories for five (5) consecutive years.

• When is 51% not a majority? When parents are given multiple votes based upon the number of children they have in a school. Because parents are given "weighted" voting rights based upon the number of children then have in a school, a minority of parents can fundamentally change the focus, the governance, the scope of teachers' rights, and the framework of a local community-based public school. 

HB 1339:

• Teachers:

• Due Process: Repeals the law concerning the continuing effect of an individual teacher's contract. Without this law, contracts will terminate on their face annually and a teacher, "effective or not," will not be protected from arbitrary termination until a new contract is signed.

• Collective Bargaining: Relative to the pro rata member/nonmember composition on committees-states that all "discussion committees" fall under this pro rata framework. Existing law exempted the bargaining team from having to adhere to the member/nonmember composition because under law, the bargaining team is the EXCLUSIVE representative.

• States that the existence of a voluntary sick bank is bargainable but the terms of the sick bank policy are not. This reneges on the 2011 pledge that wages and benefits are bargainable. A voluntary sick bank is a benefit.

• Removes the provision authorizing the continuing effect of a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) when agreement has not been reached. The whole point of the new collective bargaining law was to get to the point of agreement. There has been only one case in which agreement has not been reached---and that situation was created by allegations of unfair labor practices having occurred. In a case such as this, the party that committed an unfair labor practice should not be "rewarded" by terminating the existing CBA.

• Suspension without pay: Removes from law the requirement that a teacher who is subject to suspension without pay is entitled to a full statement of the reasons for the proposed suspension without pay and to be heard and to present the testimony of witnesses and other evidence. Also repeals the law that enables the school board to appoint an agent or attorney to issue subpoenas for the attendance of witnesses for either party at the hearing to suspend a teacher without pay.

• Teacher Compensation: Requires that each school district must submit its compensation model to the DOE and the DOE, the State Board of Accounts, and the IEERB and these bodies shall report any noncompliance to the State Board of Education -which is then required to take "appropriate action to ensure compliance."

• Virtual Charter Schools:

• Enables a virtual charter school to provide up to 90% of its program "virtually" and still qualify for state funding. Current law says 50% of instruction must be "real." The likely effect is to enable more home-schooled students to be virtually-instructed at the state's expense. There is no funding attached to this. There is no requirement that a student first attend a public school. Also, note in HB 1338, virtually funding was increased from 87.5% of Indiana's per pupil funding to 100% of Indiana's per pupil funding. The funding for these new students will come from existing public school k-12 funding.

• Repeals the law that requires the DOE to report to the state on virtual schools in Indiana.

• Charter Schools:

• As to charter school performance reporting on the DOE website, enables each charter school authorizer to develop its own performance framework in terms of the data reported (existing law says that the annual performance data for charter schools must include the same demographic and performance data required of every other public school).

• Administrators:

• Provides some of the same due process "protections" to administrators that teachers have. However, because most administrators have multi-year contracts, the consequences for cancelling a contract will likely not play out in the same fashion-that being, contracts with out-going administrators generally come with some form of buyout.

Please let your representative and every member of the House Education committee know TODAY you oppose HB 1358 & HB 1339

For additional information on these two bills and to email legislators, visit:
www.keepthepromiseindiana.org

Good News from ISTA President Nate Schnellenberger

November 9, 2011

In a historic, decisive and crucial victory, last night our neighbors in Ohio voted overwhelmingly to repeal Senate Bill 5 – Gov. John Kasich’s attack on public employee collective bargaining rights. By a nearly two-to-one margin, Ohio’s voters told Gov. Kasich and members of Ohio’s legislature that “enough is enough” – the attack on teachers, firefighters, nurses and other public employees needs to stop.

According to a leader in the We Are Ohio organization, Ohioians sent a message to all politicians last night: We don’t turn our backs on people who watch ours, and they used their citizen veto to reject Senate Bill 5.

Hoosier educators and others who support our state’s middle class need to take Ohio’s enthusiasm and make sure it spreads during the upcoming legislative session and 2012 election campaign. I am sure that if collective bargaining rights were put on the ballot in Indiana, we would see similar results to what happened yesterday in Ohio. Overwhelmingly, Hoosiers support the rights of teachers and other public employees.

Ohio’s results should give us hope as Hoosiers that we, too, can get ready now for tomorrow’s victories. This battle isn’t about Republicans. It isn’t about Democrats. It’s about giving educators and other middle class workers a voice on their jobs. It’s about protecting and growing middle class jobs.

Please take a few minutes to celebrate Ohio’s victory, but keep in mind that Indiana educators, their friends and families need to find their own energy and commitment to stop the continued attacks against them orchestrated during the last session of the General Assembly.

Let’s remind Indiana’s policymakers to take a long, hard look at the message that Ohio voters sent to their governor and legislature yesterday. We are all in this fight together – and we all need to do whatever we can for us to be successful.

Let’s learn from what our Ohio colleagues accomplished yesterday – they spoke up, they knocked on doors, they phone banked, they spoke at public forums, they never backed away from discussing or debating the issues with their friends, their neighbors, their policymakers or with the media. They spoke truth to power. And they won.

We can certainly take hope and inspiration from our neighbors to the east.

Some early and interesting analysis from We Are Ohio:

• The vote to repeal Senate Bill 5 won in 82 of Ohio’s 88 counties.
• 2,145,042 No votes were cast for repeal – 255,862 more votes than Gov. Kasich received in his 2010 election win.
• Statewide turnout was nearly 3.5 million votes – the highest turnout in decades for an off-year election in the state.

There's also good election news from our neighbor to the north, the Michigan Education Association. They targeted for recall the chairman of the House Education Committee for his support of policies that weakened teacher tenure and cut funding to public education. Last night, after the results were in, Republican state Rep. Paul Scott accepted the results showing he had been recalled by the voters in his district.

MEA officials said the recall vote reflects backlash over anti-public education policies adopted since Gov. Rick Snyder became governor this year and his political party gained control of both legislative chambers.

Teacher's Contract Lawsuit Filed Today

IDOE’s Teacher Contract Forms Not Contracts At All

INDIANAPOLIS –Dr. Tony Bennett and the Indiana Department of Education late last week issued the new teacher contract forms for the 2011-2012 school year. Upon reviewing the documents, particularly the regular teacher’s contract, the Indiana State Teachers Association believes that certain proposed terms violate both Indiana law and existing collectively-bargained contracts.

ISTA filed a lawsuit today requesting injunctive relief to prevent these documents from being forced upon Indiana’s dedicated and hard working public school teachers. ISTA also plans to request that these teacher contracts be modified to comply with Indiana law.

One major violation of the law found in the regular teacher’s contract form released by IDOE is a provision that allows school corporations to shorten or lengthen a teacher’s work day or the number of days a teacher works each year at will at any time during the school year.

Indiana’s new law clearly states that the individual teacher’s contract must contain “the number of hours per day the teacher is expected to work, as discussed pursuant to IC 20-29-6-7 (which is the teacher collective bargaining law). SEA 575-2011

The new DOE “contract” as stated below and in pertinent part, is in direct violation of that Indiana law:

“In exchange for the Teacher’s services described below, the Corporation and the Teacher agree that:

3. The Teacher’s expected work day shall consist of a minimum of _________hours daily, exclusive of any extracurricular or co-curricular assignments.

4. The number of days and hours may be modified by the Corporation during and after the term of the Contract.” (emphasis added)

“Once again, the Department (of Education) is proceeding under their theory of “proceed until apprehended,” said ISTA President Nate Schnellenberger. “The General Assembly enacted a series of laws this year that, frankly, have a multitude of ambiguities, gaps, and internal conflicts that ISTA is trying to now work through as the new school year approaches. However, the issues of a teacher’s expected hours, the discussion rights attributable to those hours, the bargainability of salary and wage-related benefits, and the content of the teacher contract itself as it relates to the number of hours (and not “minimum” hours) were not unclear and ISTA expects that the IDOE should be made to comply with the laws it promoted.”

ISTA is appalled by the contents of these contracts and especially incensed that they were issued just as teachers begin returning to school for the start of the 2011-2012 school year with little or no information from the Department of Education about the content or their consequences.
“Again, without collaboration, IDOE has taken it upon itself to “re-legislate” public education policy to suit its own agenda after the General Assembly adjourned,” concluded Schnellenberger.

Senate Bill 575 Slidecast

Senate Bill 575 Slidecast

View another webinar from ISTA Slideshow

FWEA Bargaining UPdate Meeting

FWEA will host a mass FWEA member meeting Thursday, May 26 at 4:15 pm at the Anthis Career Center Auditorium. Please bring a photo ID and sign in. Updates on the Indiana's new education legislation and bargaining information will be shared.

Indiana School Employees Rally

Members of Indiana State Teachers Association rallied at the state capitol to protest proposed anti-union, anti-public worker initiatives being promoted by Governor Mitch Daniels - especially the Governor's attempt to strip most public employees of the right to bargain collectively -- Saturday, March 5